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Welcome to the home page of the VORTEX project.

The objective of this project is to exploit the new opportunities opened up by our recent demonstration of the production of electron vortex beam in a transmission electron microscope. Electron vortex beams carry a helical phase and angular momentum around their propagation axis. They form the counterpart of optical vortex beams that were invented almost 20 years ago and have lead to many exciting new applications in optics. In preliminary experiments with electron vortices we have demonstrated (Verbeeck et al. Nature, 467,301 (2010)) their usefulness for magnetic state mapping. This property makes them very desirable for solid state physics and materials science since no other tool exists that can map the local magnetization inside materials with atomic scale resolution. We aim to develop atomic resolution magnetic state mapping and apply it to gain insight in spintronics devices as well as in topological insulators.

This project is being funded by the European Research Council Starting grant # 278510 in the scope of the European Seventh Framework Programme